That's.... err. Well that's pretty fat I have to say.I too would have been pretty despairing faced with a problem of that magnitude. Christ that must have been a messy job.

I think I would have just asked for permission, it's all about how you present it: "Your relative was an extraordinary person and we need to take extraordinary steps to help them move on with their journey. So can I bill you for the hire of a heavy duty fork lift and a couple of chain saws?"

JohnBigBootay:MorePeasPlease: Nobody cared about the body when it was ramping up to 800 lbs. while it was alive...

Now it's not unreasonable to assume someone in that poor health did not have a lot of people who cared for him, but that's all it is is an assumption because there's simply nothing about it in the article. I have a grotesquely obese family member. He makes horrible decisions and pisses me off frequently but I do care for him.

and if his fat ass doesn't fit in the crematory what would you have them do to get him cremated? 800lbs; it should have been common knowledge among all parties that it wouldn't be a standard cremation.

To which they would have answered, if they were being brutally honest with themselves, "does that cost extra?" I have a nickel says they went with the cheapest urn available, spent exactly zero on a funeral service, but now want some money for pain and suffering. I know none of that of course, just an educated guess.

I was recently considering the idea of returning to school to get a degree in mortuary science (ie become an embalmer / mortician)

While I've certainly been to lots of funerals in my life, all of them have been, obviously, after the body has been prepared.

I was thinking about this from a job-security / interesting thing to do that is totally out of left field perspective.

On one hand, I really don't know how I would react to the nasty realities of the job (putrid body fluids, decay, mutilated parts, corpse reconstruction, etc etc) I might not even be an able candidate for that sort of work, I don't know...and on the other hand I don't think one starts at much more than 40K a year for that kind of thing.

Really, you need to pick your times wisely. I'm not saying I wouldn't have done the same thing, but I would have "stayed late" one night and while alone, disposed of the body. Nobody should know about the "kinda legal" things you do.

Hey Jim! Help me cut this body into 200 pound pieces. Then I need you to help me move the 20 pounds of coke from the Hearse to the truck of my car.

I'll admit, I could stand to lose a few pounds. Maybe a few dozen pounds, if I really pushed it.

But let's get real: when you could stand to lose a few hundred pounds, there is absolutely nothing in life for you that won't be a custom build. There will be things that simply don't exist for you, because it makes no economic sense to build them.

Crematoriums, for example, are one of those things.

But you're one of a kind, to the relief of so many. You should go out in a one of a kind way. Let me just put this out there:

Darth Vader style funeral pyre.

For extra points, have someone project a younger, thinner Force Ghost in to the rising smoke plume.

Close enough. I can't imagine why you'd need to encumber the family with this information though.It isn't like all the arm ash is going to be in one place and the leg ash in another in the bag you give them.

A long time ago, a friend of mine got a job driving a limo for a funeral home which also owned a crematorium nearby. On the second day of work, he went to the crematorium on an errand, walked in, and asked "where are the cracklins, I can smell them, and I love cracklins". Turns out there was a very large person being cremated, and indeed there were no cracklins. He lasted another day or two then was let go. I assume for "being insensitive".

farkingismybusiness:You're always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together. And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it's no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shiat, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig."

Why is this a problem? He's just going to burn the farking thing until it's reduced to ash anyway, so what difference does it make? What was he supposed to do with the goddamn land whale, and how is this any worse than the weird shiat they do to bodies to prepare them for funerals? There's nothing particularly sick about this.

I have family members who are nurses and I get to hear all these stories about family members of really fat people getting all upset because the nurses have to explain that they don't have an MRI machine large enough to accommodate them.

The end goal here is to reduce them to ashes. Who cares if they have to chop it up first? Trust me, when you reach 800 pounds you aren't concerned about your body. Add to that the fact that they're dead....they really don't mind.

El Brujo:I was recently considering the idea of returning to school to get a degree in mortuary science (ie become an embalmer / mortician)

While I've certainly been to lots of funerals in my life, all of them have been, obviously, after the body has been prepared.

I was thinking about this from a job-security / interesting thing to do that is totally out of left field perspective.

On one hand, I really don't know how I would react to the nasty realities of the job (putrid body fluids, decay, mutilated parts, corpse reconstruction, etc etc) I might not even be an able candidate for that sort of work, I don't know...and on the other hand I don't think one starts at much more than 40K a year for that kind of thing.

So, I've kinda put that idea on the back burner.

I think many of the unemployed have considered this career change at some point. I think you would eventually get used to dealing with the whole dead body prep thing, the hard part would be billing and strange requests from crazy relatives. I imagine there would be the whole picking up bodies from the hospital at 3 AM and heavy lifting too.

I don't have a problem with this. What the hell difference does it make. Dead is dead. And I don't think calling the family up and saying "Your _______ is too fat to fit into my crematorium. Would you mind if I chopped him/her up into pieces to get the job done?"